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“Are you stupid?” she shouted. “Are you insane?” Az just stared at her, pain rippling across his cheek. Her brown eyes were agonized. “What were you thinking?”
“She’s not his property,” Azriel snarled, shoving down the pain with five centuries of training. Shoving back the shadows that now gathered, poised to reveal truths he couldn’t bear to hear. “She can do what she likes. She gets to choose who to share her body with.”
“She can and she does, but you couldn’t stay away? For one night? You couldn’t stay the hell away from her?” Mor had never screamed at him like this. “Is that why you baited Lucien about Hybern at dinner? You were that petty? That jealous?”
“What’s it to you?” He couldn’t stop the question. “You don’t care.”
Mor shook her head, unfairly beautiful in the moonlight, in her nightgown. “That you even have to ask tells me how clueless you are.” She looked him up and down, missing nothing. “I don’t—I don’t even know who this person is in front of me.”
He scowled, turning toward the river. It wasn’t enough to block out the disgust radiating off her in waves.
“I suggest you lie low for a while,” Mor said, frigid as the autumn night around them. “Go to the House of Wind. Go to the town house, actually, if you want to avoid the ass-kicking Cassian is going to give you.”
He didn’t care. Cassian could do what he wanted.
When he didn’t answer, Mor demanded, “Is this because of me?”
He whipped his head toward her. “What?”
She splayed her arms, pale as alabaster in the moonlight. “Is this because I don’t love you? Not the way you want, at least. So you’re on some insane path of self-destruction?”
“It has nothing to do with you.” His shadows skulked behind one of the lampposts along the bridge. “And since when does sleeping with someone count as self-destruction?”
“When it involves the mate of a key ally, who was about to aid us at great danger to himself. When you were told to find someone else. Anyone else.”
“And if I don’t want anyone else?”
Mor let out a broken laugh. “Don’t worry—I’m sure some other equally unavailable female will come along to tempt you.”
He glowered at her, so many words now spiking between them, sharp as knives and more lethal. Mor backed away a step—not in fear of him, but of those words. What remained unsaid.
And since he’d already started down this path to hell, Az growled, “Go ahead and say it, Mor.”
She retreated another step, into the dimness beyond the pool of the lamppost’s light, the hue of her nightgown darkening to bloodred. “I’m not going to engage in this absurdity with you. If Lucien evokes the Blood Duel, you’re on your own.”
With that, she winnowed.
The scant number of people on the streets had stopped to stare. With their keen Fae hearing, they must have heard every word. Az ignored them as he spread his wings and launched into the sky. His shadows trailed a few beats behind—farther than usual.
As if even they were repulsed by him.
He landed on the town house roof moments later, flinging open the door and half leaping down the stairs. His usual room on the third floor was stale from disuse—he’d need supplies. Clothes, weapons—
He glanced at Truth-Teller, still buckled at his waist—barely. Emerie had been right to caution him that it was fraying. One of the straps had now entirely severed, likely when Lucien had slammed into him. The knife dangled precariously, bouncing against his leg.
A useless, worthless weapon.
Az grabbed the remaining strap, the sheath, the knife, and snapped it off himself with one clean yank. Threw it across the room in the same motion, the blade slamming into the wall so hard it dented the plaster. As it fell to the ground, debris rained, burying it in a fine ivory coating.
That would be the blade’s final resting place, as far as he was concerned. It could lie in that corner coated in dust until it turned to dust itself. Until the world had forgotten it ever existed.
If he got lucky, maybe the world would forget he’d ever existed, too.
CHAPTER
21
Nesta
